William James - Essays in Radical Empiricism

8/8/2019 William James - Essays in Radical Empiricism

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William BarnesTHE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE: A STUDY INHUMAN NATURE. Gifford Lectures delivered at Edinburgh in 1901-

IQ02. 8vo. New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longmans,Green & Co. 1902.PRAGMATISM : A NEW NAME FOR SOME OLD WAYS OF THINKING: POPULAR LECTURES ON PHILOSOPHY. 8vo. New York,London, Bombay, and Calcutta : Longmans, Green & Co. 1907.THE MEANING OF TRUTH: A SEQUEL TO " PRAGMATISM." Svo.New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longmans, Green & Co.1909.

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE: HIBBERT LECTURES ON THEPRESENT SITUATION IN PHILOSOPHY. Svo. New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta : Longmans, Green & Co. 1909.SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY: A BEGINNING OF AN INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY. Svo. New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta : Longmans, Green & Co. 1911.ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM. Svo. New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta : Longmans, Green & Co. 1912.THE WILL TO BELIEVE, AND OTHER ESSAYS IN POPULARPHILOSOPHY. i2mo. New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta :Longmans, Green & Co. 1897.

MEMORIES AND STUDIES. Svo. New York, London, Bombay, andCalcutta: Longmans, Green & Co. 1911.THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY. 2 vols., Svo. New York ;Henry Holt & Co. London : Macmillan & Co. 1890.PSYCHOLOGY: BRIEFER COURSE. i2mo. New York: Henry Holt& Co. London : Macmillan & Co. 1892.

TALKS TO TEACHERS ON PSYCHOLOGY: AND TO STUDENTSON SOME OF LIFE S IDEALS. i2mo. New York : Henry Holt& Co. London, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longmans, Green & Co. 1899.HUMAN IMMORTALITY: TWO SUPPOSED OBJECTIONS TO THEDOCTRINE. i6mo. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. London : Archibald Constable & Co. 1898.

THE LITERARY REMAINS OF HENRY JAMES. Edited, with anIntroduction, by William James. With Portrait. Crown Svo. Boston:Houghton Mifflin Co. 1885.


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ESSAYS INKADICAL EMPIKICISM

BYWILLIAM JAMES

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND COFOURTH AVENUE & 30TH STREET, NEW YORKLONDON, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA

1912


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COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY HENRY JAMES JR.ALL RIGHTS RESERVED


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EDITOR S PREFACETHE present volume is an attempt to carryout a plan which William James is known tohave formed several years before his death.In 1907 he collected reprints in an envelopewhich he inscribed with the title Essays inRadical Empiricism ; and he also had duplicate sets of these reprints bound, under thesame title, and deposited for the use of students in the general Harvard Library, and inthe Philosophical Library in Emerson Hall.Two years later Professor James published

The Meaning of Truth and A Pluralistic Universe, and inserted in these volumes several ofthe articles which he had intended to use in theEssays in Radical Empiricism. Whether hewould nevertheless have carried out his originalplan, had he lived, cannot be certainly known.Several facts, however, stand out very clearly.In the first place, the articles included in theoriginal plan but omitted from his later volumes are indispensable to the understanding

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EDITOR S PREFACEof his other writings. To these articles he repeatedly alludes. Thus, in The Meaning ofTruth (p. 127), he says: "This statement isprobably excessively obscure to any one whohas not read my two articles * Does Consciousness Exist ? and A World of Pure Experience. " Other allusions have been indicated inthe present text. In the second place, the articles originally brought together as Essays inRadical Empiricism form a connected whole.Not only were most of them written consecutively within a period of two years, but theycontain numerous cross-references. In the thirdplace, Professor James regarded radical empiricism as an independent doctrine. This heasserted expressly: "Let me say that there isno logical connexion between pragmatism, asI understand it, and a doctrine which I haverecently set forth as radical empiricism. Thelatter stands on its own feet. One may entirely reject it and still be a pragmatist."(Pragmatism, 1907, Preface, p. ix.) Finally,Professor James came toward the end of hislife to regard /radical empiricism as more

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EDITOR S PREFACEfundamental and more important than pragmatism. In the Preface to The Meaning ofTruth (1909), the author gives the followingexplanation of his desire to continue, and ifpossible conclude, the controversy over pragmatism : " Iam interested in another doctrine inphilosophy to which I give the name of radicalempiricism, and it seems to me that the establishment of the pragmatist theory of truth is astep of first-rate importance in making radicalempiricism prevail" (p. xii).

In preparing the present volume, the editorhas therefore been governed by two motives.On the one hand, he has sought to preserve andmake accessible certain important articles notto be found in Professor James s other books.This is true of Essays I, II, IV, V, VIII, IX, X,XI, and XII. On the other hand, he has soughtto bring together in one volume a set of essaystreating systematically of one independent, co^herent, and fundamental doctrine. To this endit has seemed best to include three essays (III,VI, and VII), which, although included in theoriginal plan, were afterwards reprinted else-


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EDITOR S PREFACEwhere; and one essay, XII, not included in theoriginal plan. Essays III, VI, and VII are indispensable to the consecutiveness of the series, and are so interwoven with the rest thatit is necessary that the student should havethem at hand for ready consultation. EssayXII throws an important light on the author sgeneral empiricism/ and forms an importantlink between * radical empiricism and theauthor s other doctrines.

In short, the present volume is designed notas a collection but rather as a treatise. It isintended that another volume shall be issuedwhich shall contain papers having biographicalor historical importance which have not yetbeen reprinted in book form. The present volume is intended not only for students of Professor James s philosophy, but for studentsof metaphysics and the theory of knowledge.It sets forth systematically and within briefcompass the doctrine of radical empiricism.A word more may be in order concerning thegeneral meaning of this doctrine. In the Preface to the Will to Believe (1898), Professor

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EDITOR S PREFACEJames gives the name "radical empiricism" tohis "philosophic attitude," and adds the following explanation: "I say empiricism, becauseit is contented to regard its most assured conclusions concerning matters of fact as hypotheses liable to modification in the course offuture experience; and I say radical/ becauseit treats the doctrine of monism itself as anhypothesis, and, unlike so much of the halfwayempiricism that is current under the name ofpositivism or agnosticism or scientific naturalism, it does not dogmatically affirm monism assomething with which all experience has gotto square" (pp. vii-viii). An empiricism ofthis description is a "philosophic attitude"or temper of mind rather than a doctrine,and characterizes all of Professor James swritings. It is set forth in Essay XII of thepresent volume.

In a narrower sense, empiricism is themethod of resorting to particular experiences forthe solution of philosophical problems. Rationalists are the men of principles, empiricists themen of facts. (Some Problems of Philosophy,

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EDITOR S PREFACEp. 35; cf. also, ibid., p. 44; and Pragmatism, pp.9, 51.) Or, "since principles are universals,and facts are particulars, perhaps the best wayof characterizing the two tendencies is to saythat rationalist thinking proceeds most willingly by going from wholes to parts, while empiricist thinking proceeds by going from partsto wholes." (Some Problems of Philosophy,p. 35; cf. also ibid., p. 98; and A PluralisticUniverse, p. 7.) Again, empiricism "remandsus to sensation." (Op. cit., p. 264.) The "em-

j piricist view" insists that, "as reality is cre-1 ated temporally day by day, concepts . . .can never fitly supersede perception. . . . Thedeeper features of reality are found only inperceptual experience." (Some Problems ofPhilosophy, pp. 100, 97.) Empiricism in thissense is as yet characteristic of ProfessorJames s philosophy as a whole. It is not thedistinctive and independent doctrine set forthin the present book.The only summary of radical empiricism in

this last and narrowest sense appears in thePreface to The Meaning of Truth (pp. xii-xiii) ;

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EDITOR S PREFACEand it must be reprinted here as the key to thetext that follows. 1

"Radical empiricism consists (1) first of apostulate, (2) next of a statement of fact,(3) and finally of a generalized conclusion."

(1) "The postulate is that the only thingsthat shall be debatable among philosophers shallbe things definable in terms drawn from experience. (Things of an unexperienceable naturemay exist ad libitum, but they form no part ofthe material for philosophic debate.) " This is"the principle of pure experience" as "a methodical postulate." (Cf. below, pp. 159, 241.)This postulate corresponds to the notion whichthe author repeatedly attributes to ShadworthHodgson, the notion "that realities are onlywhat they are known as. J (Pragmatism, p.50; Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 443;The Meaning of Truth, pp. 43, 118.) In thissense radical empiricism and pragmatism areclosely allied. Indeed, if pragmatism be definedas the assertion that "the meaning of any proposition can always be brought down to some

1 The use of numerals and italics is introduced by the editor.ix


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EDITOR S PREFACEparticular consequence in our future practicalexperience, . . . the point lying in the factthat the experience must be particular ratherthan in the fact that it must be active"(Meaning of Truth, p. 210) ; then pragmatismand the above postulate come to the samething. The present book, however, consistsnot so much in the assertion of this postulate as in the use of it. And the method issuccessful in special applications by virtueof a certain "statement of fact" concerningrelations.

(2) "The statement of fact is that the relations between things, conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience, neither more so nor less so,than the things themselves." (Cf. also A Pluralistic Universe, p. 280; The Will to Believe, p.278.) This is the central doctrine of the present book. It distinguishes radical empiricism from the "ordinary empiricism" ofHume, J. S. Mill, etc., with wrhich it is otherwiseallied. (Cf. below, pp. 42-44.) It provides anempirical and relational version of activity,


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EDITOR S PREFACEand so distinguishes the author s voluntarismfrom a view with which it is easily confusedthe view which upholds a pure or transcendent activity. (Cf. below, Essay VI.) It makesit possible to escape the vicious disjunctionsthat have thus far baffled philosophy: suchdisjunctions as those between consciousnessand physical nature, between thought and itsobject, between one mind and another, andbetween one thing and another. These disjunctions need not be overcome by calling inany "extraneous trans-empirical connectivesupport" (Meaning of Truth, Preface, p. xiii);they may now be avoided by regarding thedualities in question as only differences of empirical relationship among common empiricalterms. The pragmatistic account of meaningand truth, shows only how a vicious disjunction between idea and object may thus beavoided. The present volume not only presents pragmatism in this light; but adds similar accounts of the other dualities mentionedabove.Thus while pragmatism and radical empiri-

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EDITOR S PREFACEcism do not differ essentially when regarded asmethods, they are independent when regardedas doctrines. For it would be possible to holdthe pragmatistic theory of meaning andtruth, without basing it on any fundamen

tal theory of relations, and without extendingsuch a theory of relations to residual philosophical problems; without, in short, holdingeither to the above statement of fact, or tothe following generalized conclusion.

(3) "The generalized conclusion is thattherefore the parts of experience hold togetherfrom next to next by relations that are themselvesparts of experience. The directly apprehendeduniverse needs, in short, no extraneous trans-empirical connective support, but possesses in itsown right a concatenated or continuous structure." When thus generalized, radical empiricism is not only a theory of knowledgecomprising pragmatism as a special chapter,but a metaphysic as well. It excludes "thehypothesis of trans-empirical reality " (Cf . below, p. 195). It is the author s most rigorousstatement of his theory that reality is an "ex-

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EDITOR S PREFACEperience-continuum." (Meaning of Truth, p.152; A Pluralistic Universe, Lect. v, vn.) It isthat positive and constructive empiricism ofwhich Professor James said : "Let empiricismonce become associated with religion, as hitherto, through some strange misunderstanding,it has been associated with irreligion, and Ibelieve that a new era of religion as well as ofphilosophy will be ready to begin." (Op. cit.,p. 314; cf. ibid., Lect. vm, passim; and TheVarieties of Religious Experience, pp. 515-527.)The editor desires to acknowledge his obli

gations to the periodicals from which theseessays have been reprinted, and to the manyfriends of Professor James who have renderedvaluable advice and assistance in the preparation of the present volume.

RALPH BARTON PERRY.CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS.January 8, 1912.


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CONTENTSv I. DOES CONSCIOUSNESS EXIST? . 1* ^

&* II. A WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE . . 39

fv HI. THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS 92. IV. How Two MINDS CAN KNOW ONE THING . . 123V V. THE PLACE OF AFFECTIONAL FACTS IN A WORLD

OF PURE EXPERIENCE 137/ /5V^ VI. THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY 155

y -)VII. THE ESSENCE OF HUMANISM .... .190VHI. LA NOTION DE CONSCIENCE 206IX. Is RADICAL EMPIRICISM SOLIPSISTIC? . . . .234X. MR. PITKIN S REFUTATION OF RADICAL EMPIRI- 1

CISM 241 ^XI. HUMANISM AND TRUTH ONCE MORE .... 244 vXH. ABSOLUTISM AND EMPIRICISM 266INDEX


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IDOES CONSCIOUSNESS EXIST? 1

4 THOUGHTS and things are names for twosorts of object, which common sense will always find contrasted and will always practically oppose to each other. Philosophy, reflecting on the contrast, has varied in thepast in her explanations of it, and may beexpected to vary in the future. At first,spirit and matter, soul and body, stood fora pair of equipollent substances quite on a parin weight and interest. But one day Kant undermined the soul and brought in the transcendental ego, and ever since then the bipolarrelation has been very much off its balance.The transcendental ego seems nowadays inrationalist quarters to stand for everything, inempiricist quarters for almost nothing. In thehands of such writers as Schuppe, Rehmke,Natorp, Munsterberg at any rate in his

1[Reprinted from the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. I, No. 18, September 1, 1904. For the relation be

tween this essay and those which follow, cf . below, pp. 53-54. ED.]1


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ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISMearlier writings, Schubert-Soldern and others,the spiritual principle attenuates itself to athoroughly ghostly condition, being only aname for the fact that the content of experience is known. It loses personal form and activity these passing over to the contentand becomes a bare Bewusstheit or Bewusstseinuberhaupt, of which in its own right absolutelynothing can be said.

j~~"

I believe that consciousness, when once ithas evaporated to this estate of pure diaphaneity, is on the point of disappearing altogether.It is the name of a nonentity, and has no rightto a place among first principles. Those whostill cling to it are clinging to a mere echo, thefaint rumor left behind by the disappearingsoul upon the air of philosophy. During thepast year, I have read a number of articleswhose authors seemed just on the point of abandoning the notion of consciousness,1 and substituting for it that of an absolute experiencenot due to two factors. But they were not

1 Articles by Baldwin, Ward, Bawden, King, Alexander and others.Dr. Perry is frankly over the border. ,


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DOES CONSCIOUSNESS EXIST?quite radical enough, not quite daring enoughin their negations. For twenty years past Ihave mistrusted consciousness as an entity;for seven or eight years past I have suggestedits non-existence to my students, and tried togive them its pragmatic equivalent in realities of experience. It seems tome that the houris ripe for it to be openly and universally discarded^To deny plumply that consciousness existsseems so absurd on the face of it for undeni

ably thoughts do exist that I fear somereaders will follow me no farther. Let me thenimmediately explain that I mean only to denythat theword stands for an entity, but to insistmost emphatically that it does stand for afunction. There is, I mean, no aboriginal stuffor quality of being, 1 contrasted with that ofwhich material objects are made, out of whichour thoughts of them are made; but there is afunction in experience which thoughts perform, and for the performance of which this

1 [Similarly, there is no "activity of consciousness as such." geebelow, pp. 170 ff., note. ED.]

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ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISMquality of being is invoked. That function is

"I knowing. Consciousness is supposed necessary to explain the fact that things not onlyare, but get reported, are known. Whoeverblots out the notion of consciousness from hislist of first principles must still provide in someway for that function s being carried on.

My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff_ormaterial in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuffpure experience, then knowing can easily beexplained as a particular sort of relationtowards one another into which portions ofpure experience may enter. The relation itselfis a part of pure experience; one of its termsbecomes the subject or bearer of the knowledge, the knower, 1 the other becomes the object known. This will need much explanationbefore it can be understood. The best way to

1 In my Psychology I have tried to show that we need no knowerother than the passing thought. [Principles of Psychology, vol. i, pp.338 ff.]

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DOES CONSCIOUSNESS EXIST?get it understood is to contrast it with the alternative view; and for that we may take therecentest alternative, that in which the evaporation of the definite soul-substance has proceeded as far as it can go without being yetcomplete. If neo-Kantism has expelled earlierforms of dualism, we shall have expelled allforms if we are able to expel neo-Kantism in itsturn.For the thinkers I call neo-Kantian, the word

consciousness to-day does no more than signalize the fact that experience is indefeasibly dual-istic in structure. It means that not subject,not object, but object-plus-subject is the minimum that can actually be. The subject-objectdistinction meanwhile is entirely different fromthat between mind and matter, from that between body and soul. Souls were detachable,had separate destinies; things could happen tothem. To consciousness as such nothing canhappen, for, timeless itself, it is only a witnessof happenings in time, in which it plays nopart. It is, in a word, but the logical correlative of content in an Experience of which the

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ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISMpeculiarity is that fact comes to light in it, thatawareness of content takes place. Consciousnessas such is entirely impersonal self and itsactivities belong to the content. To say that Iam self-conscious, or conscious of putting forthvolition, means only that certain contents, forwhich self and effort of will are the names,are not without witness as they occur.Thus, for these belated drinkers at the Kant

ian spring, we should have to admit consciousness as an epistemological necessity, even ifwe had no direct evidence of its being there.But in addition to this, we are supposed by

almost every one to have an immediate consciousness of consciousness itself. When theworld of outer fact ceases to be materially present, and we merely recall it in memory, orfancy it, the consciousness is believed to standout and to be felt as a kind of impalpable innerflowing, which, once known in this sort of experience, may equally be detected in presentations of the outer world. "The moment we tryto fix our attention upon consciousness and tosee what, distinctly, it is," says a recent writer,

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DOES CONSCIOUSNESS EXIST?"it seems to vanish. It seems as if we had before us a mere emptiness. When we try to introspect the sensation of blue, all we can see isthe blue; the other element is as if it were diaphanous. Yet it can be distinguished, if welook attentively enough, and know that thereis something to look for." l "Consciousness"(Bewusstheit), says another philosopher, "isinexplicable and hardly describable, yet all conscious experiences have this in common thatwhat we call their content has this peculiar reference to a centre for which self is the name,in virtue of which reference alone the contentis subjectively given, or appears. . . . Whilein this way consciousness, or reference to aself, is the only thing which distinguishes a conscious content from any sort of being thatmight be there with no one conscious of it, yetthis only ground of the distinction defies allcloser explanations. The existence of consciousness, although it is the fundamental fact ofpsychology, can indeed be laid down as certain, can, be brought out by analysis, but can

i G. E. Moore: Mind, vol. xn, N. S., [1903], p. 450.7


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ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISMneither be defined nor deduced from anythingbut itself." 1

Can be brought out by analysis/ thisauthor says. This supposes that the consciousness is one element, moment, factor call itwhat you like of an experience of essentiallydualistic inner constitution, from which, if youabstract the content, the consciousness will remain revealed to its own eye. Experience, atthis rate, would be much like a paint of whichthe world pictures were made. Paint has a dualconstitution, involving, as it does, a menstruum 2 (oil, size or what not) and a mass ofcontent in the form of pigment suspendedtherein. We can get the pure menstruum byletting the pigment settle, and the pure pigment by pouring off the size or oil. We operatehere by physical subtraction; and the usualview is, that by mental subtraction we canseparate the two factors of experience in an

1 Paul Natorp: Einleitung in die Psychologic, 1888, pp. 14, 112.2 "Figuratively speaking, consciousness may be said to be the one

universal solvent, or menstruum, in which the different concrete kindsof psychic acts and facts are contained, whether in concealed or inobvious form." G. T. Ladd: Psychology, Descriptive and Explanatory,1894, p. 30.

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DOES CONSCIOUSNESS EXIST?analogous way not isolating them entirely,but distinguishing them enough to know thatthey are two.

II

Now my contention is exactly the reverse ofthis. Experience, I believe, has no such inner duplicity; and the separation of it into consciousness and content comes, not by way of subtraction,but by way of addition the addition, to agiven concrete piece of it, of other sets of experiences, in connection with which severally itsuse or function may be of two different kinds.The paint will also serve here as an illustration.In a pot in a paint-shop, along with otherpaints, it serves in its entirety as so much saleable matter. Spread on a canvas, with otherpaints around it, it represents, on the contrary,a feature in a picture and performs a spiritualfunction. Just so, I maintain, does a given undivided portion of experience, taken in onecontext of associates, play the part of a knower,of a state of mind, of consciousness ; while ina different context the same undivided bit ofexperience plays the part of a thing known, of

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ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISMan objective * content. In a word, in one groupit figures as a thought, in another group as athing. And, since it can figure in both groups

\ simultaneously we have every right to speak of\ it as subjective and objective both at once.The dualism connoted by such double-barrelled terms as * experience, phenomenon,datum, Vorfindung* terms which, in philosophy at any rate,,tend more and more to replace the single-barrelled terms of thoughtand thing that dualism, I say, is still preserved in this account, but reinterpreted, sothat, instead of being mysterious and elusive,

1 it Jbecomes verifiable and concrete. It is an affair of relations, it falls outside, not inside, thesingle experience considered, and can always

i be particularized and defined.i The entering wedge for this more concrete

i way of understanding the dualism was fash-i ioned by Locke when he made the word ideastand indifferently for thing and thought, andby Berkeley when he said that what commonsense means by realities is exactly what thephilosopher means by ideas. Neither Locke

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DOES CONSCIOUSNESS EXIST?nor Berkeley thought his truth out into perfectclearness, but it seems to me that the conception I am defending does little more than consistently carry out the pragmatic methodwhich they were the first to use.

If the reader will take his own experiences,he will see what I mean. Let him begin with aperceptual experience, the presentation, socalled, of a physical object, his actual field ofvision, the room he sits in, with the book he isreading as its centre; and let him for the present treat this complex object in the common-sense way as being really what it seems to be,namely, a collection of physical things cut outfrom an environing world of other physicalthings with which these physical things haveactual or potential relations. Now at the sametime it is just those self-same things which hismind, as we say, perceives; and the whole philosophy of perception from Democritus s timedownwards has been just one long wrangle overthe paradox that what is evidently one realityshould be in two places at once, both in outerspace and in a person s mind. Represent-

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ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISMative theories of perception avoid the logicalparadox, but on the other hand they violate thereader s sense of life, which knows no intervening mental image but seems to see the roomand the book immediately just as they physically exist.The puzzle of how the one identical room can

be in two places is at bottom just the puzzle ofhow one identical point can be on two lines* It.can, if it be situated at their intersection-; andsimilarly, if the pure experience of the roomwere a place of intersection of two processes,which connected it with different groups of associates respectively, it could be counted twiceover, as belonging to either group, and spokenof loosely as existing in two places, although itwould remain all the time a numerically singlething.

Well, the experience is a member of diverseprocesses that can be followed away from italong entirely different lines. The one self-identical thing has so many relations to therest of experience that you can take it in disparate systems of association, and treat it as


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DOES CONSCIOUSNESS EXIST?belonging with opposite contexts. 1 In one ofthese contexts it is your field of consciousrness ; in another it is the room in which yousit/ and it enters both contexts in its wholeness, giving no pretext for being said to attachitself to consciousness by one of its parts oraspects, and to outer reality by another. Whatare the two processes, now, into which theroom-experience simultaneously enters in thisway?One of them is the reader s personal biography, the other is the history of the house ofwhich the room is part. The presentation, theexperience, the that in short (for until we havedecided what it is it must be a mere that} is thelast term of a train of sensations, emotions,decisions, movements, classifications, expectations, etc., ending in the present, and the firstterm of a series of similar inner operationsextending into the future, on the reader spart. On the other hand, the very same thatis the terminus ad quern of a lot of previous

1 [For a parallel statement of this view, cf. the author s Meaning ofTruth, p. 49, note. Cf. also below, pp. 196-197. ED.]

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ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISMphysical operations, carpentering, papering,furnishing, warming, etc., and the terminus aquo of a lot of future ones, in which it will beconcerned when undergoing the destiny of aphysical room. The physical and the mentaloperations form curiously incompatible groups.As a room, the experience has occupied thatspot and had that environment for thirtyyears. As your field of consciousness it maynever have existed until now. As a room, attention will go on to discover endless new details in it. As your mental state merely, fewnew ones will emerge under attention s eye.As a room, it will take an earthquake, or agang of men, and in any case a certain amountof time, to destroy it. As your subjectivestate, the closing of your eyes, or any instantaneous play of your fancy will suffice. In thereal world, fire will consume it. In your mind,you can let fire play over it without effect. Asan outer object, you must pay so much amonth to inhabit it. As an inner content, youmay occupy it for any length of time rent-free.If, in short, you follow it in the mental direc-

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DOES CONSCIOUSNESS EXIST?tion, taking it along with events of personalbiography solely, all sorts of things are trueof it which are false, and false of it which aretrue if you treat it as a real thing experienced,follow it in the physical direction, and relate itto associates in the outer world.

Ill

So far, all seems plain sailing, but my thesiswill probably grow less plausible to the readerwhen I pass from percepts to concepts, or from/the case of things presented to that of thingsremote. I believe, nevertheless, that here alsothe same law holds good. If we take conceptual manifolds, or memories, or fancies, theyalso are in their first intention mere bits ofpure experience, and, as such, are single thatswhich act in one context as objects, and in another context figure as mental states. By taking them in their first intention, I mean ignoring their relation to possible perceptual experiences with which they may be connected,which they may lead to and terminate in, andwhich then they may be supposed to repre-

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ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISMsent/ Taking them in this way first, we confine the problem to a world merely * thought-of and not directly felt or seen. 1 This world,just like the world of percepts, comes to us atfirst as a chaos of experiences, but lines of ordersoon get traced. We find that any bit of itwhich we may cut out as an example is connected with distinct groups of associates, justas our perceptual experiences are, that theseassociates link themselves with it by differentrelations,2 and that one forms the inner historyof a person, while the other acts as an impersonal objective world, either spatial and temporal, or else merely logical or mathematical,or otherwise ideal.The first obstacle on the part of the reader to

seeing that these non-perceptual experiences1 [For the author s recognition of "concepts as a co-ordinate

realm" of reality, cf. his Meaning of Truth, pp. 42, 195, note; A Pluralistic Universe, pp. 339-340; Some Problems of Philosophy, pp. 50-57,67-70; and below, p. 16, note. Giving this view the name logicalrealism, he remarks elsewhere that his philosophy "maybe regardedas somewhat eccentric in its attempt to combine logical realism withan otherwise empiricist mode of thought" (Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 106). ED.]

2 Here as elsewhere the relations are of course experienced relations, members of the same originally chaotic manifold of non-perceptual experience of which the related terms themselves areparts. [Cf. below, p. 42.]

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DOES CONSCIOUSNESS EXIST?have objectivity as well as subjectivity willprobably be due to the intrusion into his mindof percepts, that third group of associates withwhich the non-perceptual experiences have relations, and which, as a whole, they "represent/standing to them as thoughts to things. Thisimportant function of the non-perceptual experiences complicates the question and confusesit; for, so used are we to treat percepts asthe sole genuine realities that, unless we keepthem out of the discussion, we tend altogetherto overlook the objectivity that lies in non-perceptual experiences by themselves. Wetreat them, knowing percepts as they do, asthrough and through subjective, and say thatthey are wholly constituted of the stuff calledconsciousness, using this term now for a kindof entity, after the fashion which I am seekingto refute. 1

Abstracting, then, from percepts altogether,what I maintain is, that any single non-per-

1 Of the representative function of non-perceptual experience as awhole, I will say a word in a subsequent article: it leads too far into thegeneral theory of knowledge for much to be said about it in a shortpaper like this. [Cf. below, pp. 52 ff.J

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ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISMceptual experience tends to get counted twiceover, just as a perceptual experience does, figuring in one context as an object or field of objects, in another as a state of mind: and all thiswithout the least internal self-diremption on itsown part into consciousness and content. It isall consciousness in one taking; and, in theother, all content.

I find this objectivity of non-perceptual experiences, this complete parallelism in point ofreality between the presently felt and the remotely thought, so well set forth in a page ofMtinsterberg s Grundzuge, that I will quote itas it stands.

"I may only think of my objects," says Professor Mlinsterberg; "yei, in my living thoughtthey stand before me exactly as perceived objects would do, no matter how different the twoways of apprehending them may be in theirgenesis. The book here lying on the table beforeme, and the book in the next room of which Ithink and which I mean to get, are both in thesame sense given realities for me, realitieswhich I acknowledge and of which I take ac-

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DOES CONSCIOUSNESS EXIST?count. If you agree that the perceptual objectis not an idea within me, but that percept andthing, as indistinguishably one, are reallyexperienced there, outside, you ought not to believethat the merely thought-of object is hid awayinside of the thinking subject. The object ofwhich I think, and of whose existence I takecognizance without letting it now work uponmy senses, occupies its definite place in theouter world as much as does the object which Idirectly see."

"What is true of the here and the there, isalso true of the now and the then. I know ofthe thing which is present and perceived, but Iknow also of the thing which yesterday wasbut is no more, and which I only remember.Both can determine my present conduct, bothare parts of the reality of which I keep account.It is true that of much of the past I am uncertain, just as I am uncertain of much of whatis present if it be but dimly perceived. But theinterval of time does not in principle alter myrelation to the object, does not transform itfrom an object known into a mental state. . . .

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ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISMThe things in the room here which I survey,and those in my distant home of which I think,the things of this minute and those of my long-vanished boyhood, influence and decide mealike, with a reality which my experience ofthem directly feels. They both make up myreal world, they make it directly, they do nothave first to be introduced to me and mediated by ideas which now and here arisewithin me. . . . This not-me character ofmy recollections and expectations does notimply that the external objects of which I amaware in those experiences should necessarilybe there also for others. The objects of dreamers and hallucinated persons are wholly without general validity. But even were they centaurs and golden mountains, they still wouldbe off there, in fairy land, and not inside 5 ofourselves." 1

This certainly is the immediate, primary,naif, or practical way of taking our thought-ofworld. Were there no perceptual world toserve as its reductive, in Taine s sense, by

1 Mfinsterberg: Grundziige der Psychologic, vol. i, p. 48.20


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DOES CONSCIOUSNESS EXIST?being "stronger 5 and more genuinely outer(so that the whole merely thought-of worldseems weak and inner in comparison), ourworld of thought would be the only world, andwould enjoy complete reality in our belief.This actually happens in our dreams, and inour day-dreams so long as percepts do notinterrupt them.And yet, just as the seen room (to go back to

our late example) is also a field of consciousness, so the conceived or recollected room isalso a state of mind; and the doubling-up of theexperience has in both cases similar grounds.The room thought-of, namely, has manythought-of couplings with many thought-of

things. Some of these couplings are inconstant,others are stable. In the reader s personal history the room occupies a single date he sawit only once perhaps, a year ago. Of the house shistory, on the other hand, it forms a permanent ingredient. Some couplings have the curious stubbornness, to borrow Royce s term, offact; others show the fluidity of fancy we letthem come and go as we please. Grouped with

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ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISMthe rest of its house, with the name of its town,of its owner, builder, value, decorative plan,the room maintains a definite foothold, towhich, if we try to loosen it, it tends to return,and to reassert itself with force. 1 With theseassociates, in a word, it coheres, while to otherhouses, other towns, other owners, etc., it showsno tendency to cohere at all. The two collections, first of its cohesive, and, second, of itsloose associates, inevitably come to be contrasted. We call the first collection the systemof external realities, in the midst of which theroom, as real, 5 exists; the other we call thestream of our internal thinking, in which, as amental image, it for a moment floats. 2 Theroom thus again gets counted twice over. Itplays two different roles, being Gedanke andGedachtes, the thought-of-an-object, and theobject-thought-of, both in one; and all thiswithout paradox or mystery, just as the same

1 Cf. A. L. Hodder: The Adversaries of the Sceptic, pp. 94-99.2 For simplicity s sake I confine my exposition to external reality.But there is also the system of ideal reality in which the room plays its

part. Relations of comparison, of classification, serial order, value,also are stubborn, assign a definite place to the room, unlike the incoherence of its places in the mere rhapsody of our successive thoughts.[Cf. above, p. 16.]


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DOES CONSCIOUSNESS EXIST?material thing may be both low and high, orsmall and great, or bad and good, because of itsrelations to opposite parts of an environingworld.As subjective we say that the experience

represents; as objective it is represented.What represents and what is represented is here \numerically the same; but we must remember /that no dualism of being represented and re- 1presenting resides in the experience per se. Inits pure state, or when isolated, there is no self-splitting of it into consciousness and what theconsciousness is of. Its subjectivity and objectivity are functional attributes solely, realized only when the experience is taken, i. e. 9talked-of , twice, considered along with its twodiffering contexts respectively, by a new retrospective experience, of which that whole pastcomplication now forms the fresh content.The instant field of the present is at all times -\j

what I call the pure experience. It is onlyvirtually or potentially either object or subjectas yet. For the time being, it is plain, unqualified actuality, or existence, a simple that. In this

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ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISMnaif immediacy it is of course valid; it is there,we act upon it; and the doubling of it in retrospection into a state of mind and a reality intended thereby, is just one of the acts. Thestate of mind/ first treated explicitly as suchin retrospection, will stand corrected or confirmed, and the retrospective experience in itsturn will get a similar treatment; but the immediate experience in its passing is alwaystruth,

*practical truth, something to act on, at

its own movement. If the world were then andthere to go out like a candle, it would remaintruth absolute and objective, for it would bethe last word, would have no critic, and noone would ever oppose the thought in it to thereality intended. 2

I think I may now claim to have made my1 Note the ambiguity of this term, which is taken sometimes

objectively and sometimes subjectively.2 In the Psychological Review for July [1904], Dr. R. B. Perry has

published a view of Consciousness which comes nearer to mine thanany other with which I am acquainted. At present. Dr. Perry thinks,every field of experience is so much fact. It becomes opinion or* thought only in retrospection, when a fresh experience, thinking thesame object, alters and corrects it. But the corrective experiencebecomes itself in turn corrected, and thus experience as a whole is aprocess in which what is objective originally forever turns subjective,turns into our apprehension of the object. I strongly recommendDr. Perry s admirable article to my readers.M


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DOES CONSCIOUSNESS EXIST?thesis clear. Consciousness connotes a kind of \external relation, and does not denote a specialstuff or way of being. The peculiarity of our experiences, that they not only are, but are known,which their conscious 9 quality is invoked toexplain, is better explained by their relationsthese relations themselves being experiences toone another.

IVWere I now to go on to treat of the knowing

of perceptual by conceptual experiences, itwould again prove to be an affair of externalrelations. One experience would be the knower,the other the reality known; and I couldperfectly well define, without the notion ofconsciousness, what the knowing actuallyand practically^amounts to leading-towards,namely, and terminating-in percepts, througha series of transitional experiences which theworld supplies. But I will not treat of this,space being insufficient. 1 I will rather consider

1 I have given a partial account of the matter in Mind, vol. x, p. 27,1885 [reprinted in The Meaning of Truth, pp. 1-42], and in thePsychological Review, vol. n, p. 105, 1895 [partly reprinted in TheMeaning of Truth, pp. 43-50]. See also C. A. Strong s article in the

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ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISMa few objections that are sure to be urgedagainst the entire theory as it stands.

First of all, this will be asked: "If experiencehas not conscious existence, if it be notpartly made of consciousness/ of what thenis it made? Matter we know, and thought weknow, and conscious content we know, butneutral and simple pure experience is something we know not at all. Say what it consistsof for it must consist of something or bewilling to give it up "To this challenge the reply is easy. Although

for fluency s sake I myself spoke early in thisarticle of a stuff of pure experience, I have nowto say that there is no general stuff of which experience at large is made. There are as manystuffs as there are natures in the things experienced. If you ask what any one bit of pureexperience is made of, the answer is always theJournal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. I, p.253, May 12, 1904. I hope myself very soon to recur to the matter.[See below, pp. 52 ff.]

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DOES CONSCIOUSNESS EXIST?same : *" It is made of that, of just what appearsKof space, of intensity, of flatness, brownness,heaviness, or what not."1 Shadworth Hodgson s analysis here leaves nothing to be desired. 1 Experience is only a collective name^for all these sensible natures, and save for timeand space (and, if you like, for being ) thereappears no universal element of which allthings are made.

VIThe next objection is more formidable, in

fact it sounds quite crushing when one hearsit first.

"If it be the self-same piece of pure experience, taken twice over, that serves now asthought and now as thing" so the objection runs "how comes it that its attributesshould differ so fundamentally in the two takings. As thing, the experience is extended; asthought, it occupies no space or place. Asthing, it is red, hard, heavy; but who ever heard

1 [Cf. Shadworth Hodgson: The Metaphysic of Experience, vol. i,passim ; The Philosophy of Reflection, bk. u, ch. iv, 3. ED.]

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ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISMof a red, hard or heavy thought ? Yet evennow you said that an experience is made ofjust what appears, and what appears is justsuch adjectives. How can the one experiencein its thing-function be made of them, consistof them, carry them as its own attributes, whilein its thought-function it disowns them andattributes them elsewhere. There is a self-contradiction here from which the radical dualismof thought and thing is the only truth that cansave us. Only if the thought is one kind ofbeing can the adjectives exist in it intentionally (to use the scholastic term); only if thething is another kind, can they exist in it con-stitutively and energetically. No simple subject can take the same adjectives and at onetime be qualified by it, and at another time bemerely of it, as of something only meant orknown."The solution insisted on by this objector, like

many other common-sense solutions, growsthe less satisfactory the more one turns it inone s mind. To begin with, are thought andthing as heterogeneous as is commonly said ?

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DOES CONSCIOUSNESS* EXIST?No one denies that theyhave some categories

in common. Their relations to time are identical. Both, moreover, may have parts (forpsychologists in general treat thoughts as having them) ; and both may be complex or simple.Both are of kinds, can be compared, added andsubtracted and arranged in serial orders. Allsorts of adjectives qualify our thoughts whichappear incompatible with consciousness, beingas such a bare diaphaneity. For instance, theyare natural and easy, or laborious. They arebeautiful, happy, intense, interesting, wise,idiotic, focal, marginal, insipid, confused,vague, precise, rational, casual, general, particular, and many things besides. Moreover,the chapters on Perception in the psychology-books are full of facts that make for theessential homogeneity of thought with thing.How, if subject and object were separatedby the whole diameter of being, and had noattributes in common, could it be so hard totell, in a presented and recognized materialobject, what part comes in through the sense-organs and what part comes out of one s own

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ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISMhead ? Sensations and apperceptive ideas fusehere so intimately that you can no more tellwhere one begins and the other ends, than youcan tell, in those cunning circular panoramasthat have lately been exhibited, where the realforeground and the painted canvas join together. 1

Descartes for the first time defined thoughtas the absolutely unextended, and later philosophers have accepted the description as correct. But what possible meaning has it to say

/that, when we think of a foot-rule or a squareyard, extension is not attributable to ourthought? Of every extended object the adequate mental picture must have all the extension of the object itself. The difference be-\jtween objective and subjective extension is\one of relation to a context solely. In the mindthe various extents maintain no necessarilystubborn order relatively to each other, while

1 Spencer s proof of his Transfigured Realism* (his doctrine thatthere is an absolutely non-mental reality) comes to mind as a splendidinstance of the impossibility of establishing radical heterogeneitybetween thought and thing. All his painfully accumulated points ofdifference run gradually into their opposites, and are full of exceptions. [Cf. Spencer: Principles of Psychology, part vn, ch. xix.]

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DOES CONSCIOUSNESS EXIST?in the physical world they bound each otherstably, and, added together, make the greatenveloping Unit which we believe in and callreal Space. As outer, they carry themselvesadversely, so to speak, to one another, excludeone another and maintain their distances;while, as inner, their order is loose, and theyform a durcheinander in which unity is lost. 1But to argue from this that inner experience isabsolutely inextensive seems to me little shortof absurd. The two worlds differ, not by thepresence or absence of extension, but by therelations of the extensions which in bothworlds exist.Does not this case of extension now put us

on the track of truth in the case of other qualities? It does; and I am surprised that the factsshould not have been noticed long ago. Why,for example, do we call a fire hot, and waterwet, and yet refuse to say that our mentalstate, when it is of these objects, is either wetor hot? Intentionally, at any rate, and when

1 I speak here of the complete inner life in which the mind playsfreely with its materials. Of course the mind s free play is restrictedwhen it seeks to copy real things in real space.

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ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISMthe mental state is a vivid image, hotness andwetness are in it just as much as they are in thephysical experience. The reason is this, that,as the general chaos of all our experiences getssifted, we find that there are some fires thatwill always burn sticks and always warm ourbodies, and that there are some waters thatwill always put out fires; while there are otherfires and waters that will not act at all. Thegeneral group of experiences that act, that donot only possess their natures intrinsically, butwear them adjectively and energetically, turning them against one another, comes inevitablyto be contrasted with the group whose members, having identically the same natures, failto manifest them in the energetic way. 1 Imake for myself now an experience of blazingfire; I place it near my body; but it does notwarm me in the least. I lay a stick upon it, andthe stick either burns or remains green, as Iplease. I call up water, and pour it on the fire,and absolutely no difference ensues. I account

1 [But there are also "mental activity trains," in which thoughtsdo "work on each other." Cf. below, p. 184, note. ED.]

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DOES CONSCIOUSNESS EXIST?for all such facts by calling this whole trainof experiences unreal, a mental train. Mentalfire is what won t burn real sticks; mental water is what won t necessarily (though of courseit may) put out even a mental fire. Mentalknives may be sharp, but they won t cut realwood. Mental triangles are pointed, but theirpoints won t wound. With real objects, on /the contrary, consequences always accrue; and ^thus the real experiences get sifted from themental ones, the things from our thoughts ofthem, fanciful or true, and precipitated together as the stable part of the whole experience-chaos, under the name of the physicaworld. Of this our perceptual experiences arethe nucleus, they being the originally strongexperiences. We add a lot of conceptual experiences to them, making these strong also inimagination, and building out the remoterparts of the physical world by their means;and around this core of reality the worldof laxly connected fancies and mere rhapsodical objects floats like a bank of clouds.In the clouds, all sorts of rules are violated

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ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISMwhich in the core are kept. Extensions therecan be indefinitely located; motion there obeysno Newton s laws.

VIIThere is a peculiar class of experiences to

which, whether we take them as subjective oras objective, we assign their several natures asattributes, because in both contexts they affecttheir associates actively, though in neitherquite as strongly or as sharply as things affect one another by their physical energies. Irefer here to appreciations, which form an am-biguous sphere of being, belongingwith emotionon the one hand, and having objective valueon the other, yet seeming not quite inner norquite outer, as if a diremption had begun buthad not made itself complete. 1

Experiences of painful objects, for example,are usually also painful experiences; perceptions of loveliness, of ugliness, tend to passmuster as lovely or as ugly perceptions; intuitions of the morally lofty are lofty intuitions.

1 [This topic is resumed below, pp. 137 ff. ED.]34


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DOES CONSCIOUSNESS EXIST?Sometimes the adjective wanders as if uncertain where to fix itself. Shall we speakseductive visions or of visions of seductivethings? Of wicked desires or of desires forwickedness ?t Of healthy thoughts or of thoughtsof healthy objects? Of good impulses, or ofimpulses towards the good? Of feelings ofanger, or of angry feelings? Both in the mindand in the thing, these natures modify theircontext, exclude certain associates and determine others, have their mates and incompati-bles. Yet not as stubbornly as in the case ofphysical qualities, for beauty and ugliness,love and hatred, pleasant and painful can, incertain complex experiences, coexist.

If one were to make an evolutionary con-struction of how a lot of originally chaotic pureexperiences became gradually differentiatedinto an orderly inner and outer world, thewhole theory would turn upon one s success inexplaining how or why the quality of an experience, once active, could become less so, and,from being an energetic attribute in somecases, elsewhere lapse into the status of an

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ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM;, inert or merely internal nature/ This would

. be the evolution of the psychical from thebosom of the physical, in which the esthetic,moral and otherwise emotional experienceswould represent a halfway stage.

VIIIBut a last cry of non possumus will probably

go up from many readers. "All very pretty asa piece of ingenuity," they will say, "but ourconsciousness itself intuitively contradicts you.We, for our part, know that we are conscious.We feel our thought, flowing as a life within us,in absolute contrast with the objects which itso unremittingly escorts. We can not be faith-

iless to this immediate intuition. The dualism

Iis a fundamental datum: Let no man join whatGod has put asunder."My reply to this is my last word, and I

greatly grieve that to many it will sound materialistic. I can not help that, however, forI, too, have my intuitions and I must obeythem. Let the case be what it may in others, Iam as confident as I am of anything that, in

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DOES CONSCIOUSNESS* EXIST?myself, the stream of thinking (which I recognize emphatically as a phenomenon) is only acareless name for what, when scrutinized, reveals itself to consist chiefly of the stream ofmy breathing.

JThe I think which Kant said\

must be able to accompany all my objects, is 1the I breathe which actually does accom- /pany them. There are other internal factsbesides breathing] (intracephalic muscular adjustments, etc., of which I have said a word inmy larger Psychology) ,[and these increase the /assets of consciousness, so far as the latter issubject to immediate perception; -1 but] breath,which was ever the original of spirit, breathmoving outwards, between the glottis and thenostrils, is, I am persuaded, the essence out ofwhich philosophers have constructed the entity known to them as consciousness, j Thatentity is fictitious, while thoughts in the concreteare fully real. But thoughts in the concrete aremade of the same stuff as things are.

I wish I might believe myself to have made1 [Principles of Psychology, vol. I, pp. 299-305. Cf. below, pp. 169-

171 (note).]37


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IIA WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE 1

IT is difficult not to notice a curious unrest inthe philosophic atmosphere of the time, aloosening of old landmarks, a softening of oppositions, a mutual borrowing from one another on the part of systems anciently closed,and an interest in new suggestions, howevervague, as if the one thing sure were the inadequacy of the extant school-solutions. The dissatisfaction with these seems due for the mostpart to a feeling that they are too abstract andacademic. Life is confused and superabundant,and what the younger generation appears tocrave is more of the temperament of life .in itsphilosophy, even though it were at some costof logical rigor and of formal purity. Tran-

1 [Reprinted from the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. 1, 1904, No. 20, September 29, and No. 21, October13. Pp. 52-76 have also been reprinted, with some omissions, alterations and additions, .in The Meaning of Truth, pp. 102-120. Thealterations have been adopted in the present text. This essay is referred to in A Pluralistic Universe, p. 280, note 5. ED.]

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ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISMscendental idealism is inclining to let the worldwag incomprehensibly, in spite of its AbsoluteSubject and his unity of purpose. Berkeleyanidealism is abandoning the principle of parsimony and dabbling in panpsychic speculations. Empiricism flirts with teleology; and,strangest of all, natural realism, so long decently buried, raises its head above the turf,and finds glad hands outstretched from themost unlikely quarters to help it to its feetagain. We are all biased by our personal feelings, I know, and I am personally discontentedwith extant solutions; so I seem to read thesigns of a great unsettlement, as if the upheaval of more real conceptions and more fruitful methods were imminent, as if a true landscape might result, less clipped, straight-edgedand artificial.

If philosophy be really on the eve of any considerable rearrangement, the time should bepropitious for any one who has suggestions ofhis own to bring forward. For manyyears pastmy mind has been growing into a certain typeof Weltanschauung. Rightly or wrongly, I have

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ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISMa being of the second order. It is essentiallya mosaic philosophy, a philosophy of pluralfacts, like that of Hume and his descendants,who refer these facts neither to Substances inwhich they inhere nor to an Absolute Mindthat creates them as its objects. But it differsfrom the Humian type of empiricism in oneparticular which makes me add the epithetradical.

To be radical, an empiricism must neitheradmit into its constructions any element thatis not directly experienced, nor exclude fromthem any element that is directly experienced.For such a philosophy, the relations that connectexperiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced mustbe accounted as real* as anything else in thesystem. Elements may indeed be redistributed,the original placing of things getting corrected,but a real place must be found for every kindof thing experienced, whether term or relation,in the final philosophic arrangement.Now, ordinary empiricism, in spite of the

fact that conjunctive and disjunctive relations


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ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISMwhereas, if empiricism had only been radicaland taken everything that comes without disfavor, conjunction as well as separation, eachat its face value, the results would have calledfor no such artificial correction. Radical em-piricism, as I understand it, does full justice toconjunctive relations, without, however, treating them as rationalism always tends to treatthem, as being true in some supernal way, as ifthe unity of things and their variety belongedto different orders of truth and vitality altogether.

II. CONJUNCTIVE RELATIONSRelations are of different degrees of inti

macy. Merely to be with one another in auniverse of discourse is the most external relation that terms can have, and seems to involvenothing whatever as to farther consequences.Simultaneity and time-interval come next, andthen space-adjacency and distance. Afterthem, similarity and difference, carrying thepossibility of many inferences. Then relationsof activity, tying terms into series involving

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WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCEchange, tendency, resistance, and the causalorder generally. Finally, the relation experienced between terms that form states of mind,and are immediately conscious of continuingeach other. The organization of the Self as asystem of memories, purposes, strivings, fulfilments or disappointments, is incidental tothis most intimate of all relations, the termsof which seem in many cases actually to corn-penetrate and suffuse each other s being.

1

Philosophy has always turned on grammatical particles. With, near, next, like, from,towards, against, because, for, through, mythese words designate types of conjunctiverelation arranged in a roughly ascending orderof intimacy and inclusiveness. A priori, we canimagine a universe of withness but no nextness;or one of nextness but no likeness, or of likenesswith no activity, or of activity with no purpose, or of purpose with no ego. These wouldbe universes, each with its own grade of unity.The universe of human experience is, by one oranother of its parts, of each and all these grades.

1 [See "The Experience of Activity," below, pp. 155-189.]45

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WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCEterminating, it is true, in a nucleus of commonperception, but for the most part out of sightand irrelevant and unimaginable to one another. This imperfect intimacy, this bare relation of wiihness between some parts of thesum total of experience and other parts, is thefact that ordinary empiricism over-emphasizesagainst rationalism, the latter always tendingto ignore it unduly. Radical empiricism, onthe contrary, is fair to both the unity and thedisconnection. It finds no reason for treatingeither as illusory. It allots to each its definitesphere of description, and agrees that thereappear to be actual forces at work which tend,as time goes on, to make the unity greater.The conjunctive relation that has given

most trouble to philosophy is the co-conscioustransition, so to call it, by which one experiencepasses into another when both belong to thesame self. About the facts there is no question. My experiences and your experiences arewith each other in various external ways, butmine pass into mine, and yours pass into yoursin a way in which yours and mine never pass

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ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISMinto one another. Within each of our personalhistories, subject, object, interest and purposeare continuous or may be continuous. 1 Personalhistories are processes of change in time, andthe change itself is one of the things immediatelyexperienced. Change in this case means continuous as opposed to discontinuous transition. But continuous transition is one sort of a .conjunctive relation; and to be a radical empiricist means to hold fast to this conjunctiverelation of all others, for this is the strategicpoint, the position through which, if a hole bemade, all the corruptions of dialectics and allthe metaphysical fictions pour into our philosophy. The holding fast to this relation meanstaking it at its face value, neither less nor more ;and to take it at its face value means first ofall to take it just as we feel it, and not to confuse ourselves with abstract talk about it, involving words that drive us to invent secondary conceptions in order to neutralize their

1 The psychology books have of late described the facts here withapproximate adequacy. I may refer to the chapters on The Stream ofThought and on the Self in my own Principles of Psychology, as wellas to S. H. Hodgson s Metaphysic of Experience, vol. I, ch. vn and vui.

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WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCEsuggestions and to make our actual experienceagain seem rationally possible.^ What I do feel simply when a later momentof my experience succeeds an earlier one is thatthough they are two moments, the transitionfrom the one to the other is continuous.? Continuity here is a definite sort of experience; justas definite as is the discontinuity-experiencewhich I find it impossible to avoid when I seekto make the transition from an experience ofmy own to one of yours. In this latter case I ^have to get on and off again, to pass from a W"thing lived to another thing only conceived,and the break is positively experienced andnoted. Though the functions exerted by myexperience and by yours may be the same (e. g.,the same objects known and the same purposesfollowed), yet the sameness has in this case tobe ascertained expressly (and often with difficulty and uncertainty) after the break has beenfelt; whereas in passing from one of my ownmoments to another the sameness of object andinterest is unbroken, and both the earlier andthe later experience are of things directly lived.

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ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISMThere is no other nature, no other whatness

than this absence of break and this sense ofcontinuity in that most intimate of all conjunctive relations, the passing of one experienceinto another when they belong to the same self.And this whatness is real empirical content,just as the whatness of separation and discontinuity is real content in the contrasted case.Practically to experience one s personal continuum in this living way is to know the originalsof the ideas of continuity and of sameness, toknow what the words stand for concretely, toown all that they can ever mean. But all experiences have their conditions; and over-subtleintellects, thinking about the facts here, andasking how they are possible, have ended bysubstituting a lot of static objects of conception for the direct perceptual experiences."Sameness," they have said, "must be a starknumerical identity; it can t run on from next tonext. Continuity can t mean mere absence ofgap; for if you say two things are in immediatecontact, at the contact how can they be two?If, on the other hand, you put a relation of

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WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCEfinite knowers, and brought an Absolute in toperform the saltatory act. All the while, inthe very bosom of the finite experience, everyconjunction required to make the relation intelligible is given in full. Either the knowerand the known are:

(1) the self-same piece of experience takentwice over in different contexts; or they are

(2) two pieces of actual experience belonging to the same subject, with definite tracts ofconjunctive transitional experience betweenthem; or

(3) the known is a possible experience eitherof that subject or another, to which the saidconjunctive transitions would lead, if sufficiently prolonged.To discuss all the ways in which one ex

perience may function as the knower of another, would be incompatible with the limitsof this essay. 1 I have just treated of type 1, the

1 For brevity s sake I altogether omit mention of the type constituted by knowledge of the truth of general propositions. This typehas been thoroughly and, so far as I can see, satisfactorily, elucidatedin Dewey s Studies in Logical Theory. Such propositions are reducibleto the S-is-P form; and the terminus that verifies and fulfils is theSP in combination. Of course percepts may be involved in the medi-

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ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISMkind of knowledge called perception.1 This isthe type of case in which the mind enjoys direct acquaintance with a present object. Inthe other types the mind has knowledge-about an object not immediately there. Oftype 2, the simplest sort of conceptual knowledge, I have given some account in two[earlier] articles. 2 Type 3 can always formallyand hypothetically be reduced to type 2, sothat a brief description of that type will putthe present reader sufficiently at my pointof view, and make him see what the actualmeanings of the mysterious cognitive relationmay be.

Suppose me to be sitting here in my libraryating experiences, or in the satisfactoriness of the P in its newposition.

1 [See above, pp. 9-15.]2

["On the Function of Cognition," Mind, vol. x, 1885, and "TheKnowing of Things Together," Psychological Review, vol. n, 1895.These articles are reprinted, the former in full, the latter in part, in TheMeaning of Truth, pp. 1-50. ED.] These articles and their doctrine,unnoticed apparentlybyany one else, have lately gained favorablecomment from Professor Strong. ["A Naturalistic Theory of the Reference of Thought to Reality," Journal of Philosophy, Psychology andScientific Methods, vol. i, 1904.] Dr. Dickinson S. Miller has independently thought out thesame results ["The Meaning of Truth and Error,"Philosophical Review, vol. n, 1893; "The Confusion of Function andContent in Mental Analysis," Psychological Review, vol. n, 1895],which Strong accordingly dubs the James-Miller theory of cognition.

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WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCEnected, if connected at all, by inferior relations

bare likeness or succession, or by withnessalone. Knowledge of sensible realities thuscomes to life inside the tissue of experience. It Jis made ; and made by relations that unrol 1themselves in time. Whenever certain intermediaries are given, such that, as they developtowards their terminus, there is experiencefrom point to point of one direction followed,and finally of one process fulfilled, the result^is that their starting-point thereby becomes aknower and their terminus an object meant orknown. That is all that knowing (in the simple case considered) can be known-as, that isthe whole of its nature, put into experientialterms. Whenever such is the sequence of ourexperiences we may freely say that we had theterminal object in mind from the outset, evenalthough at the outset nothing was there in usbut a flat piece of substantive experience likeany other, with no self-transcendency about it,and no mystery save the mystery of cominginto existence and of being gradually followedby other pieces of substantive experience, with

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ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISMconjunctively transitional experiences between.That is what we mean here by the object sbeing in mind. Of any deeper more real wayof being in mind we have no positive conception, and we have no right to discredit ouractual experience by talking of such a wayat all.

I know that many a reader will rebel at this."Mere intermediaries," he will say, "eventhough they be feelings of continuously growing fulfilment, only separate the knower fromtheknown, whereas what we have in knowledgeis a kind of immediate touch of the one by theother, an * apprehension in the etymologicalsense of the word, a leaping of the chasm as bylightning, an act by which two terms are smitten into one, over the head of their distinctness. All these dead intermediaries of yoursare out of each other, and outside of theirtermini still."But do not such dialectic difficulties remind

us of the dog dropping his bone and snappingat its image in the water? If we knew any morereal kind of union aliunde, we might be entitled

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WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCEbe true, but the percept s existence as theterminus of the chain of intermediaries createsthe function. Whatever terminates that chainwas, because it now proves itself to be, whatthe concept "had in mind.The towering importance for human life ofthis kind of knowing lies in the fact that an

experience that knows another can figure asits representative, not in any quasi-miraculousepistemological sense, but in the definitepractical sense of being its substitute in variousoperations, sometimes physical and sometimesmental, which lead us to its associates and results. By experimenting on our ideas of reality,we may save ourselves the trouble of experimenting on the real experiences which theyseverally mean. The ideas form related systems, corresponding point for point to the systems which the realities form; and by letting anideal term call up its associates systematically,we may be led to a terminus which the corresponding real term would have led to in casewe had operated on the real world. And thisbrings us to the general question of substitution.

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ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISMfact, and in a general way, the paths thatrun through conceptual experiences, that is,through thoughts or ideas that know thethings in which they terminate, are highly advantageous paths to follow. Not only do theyyield inconceivably rapid transitions; but, owing to the universal character l which theyfrequently possess, and to their capacity forassociation with one another in great systems,they outstrip the tardy consecutions of thethings themselves, and sweep us on towardsour ultimate termini in a far more labor-savingway than the following of trains of sensibleperception ever could. Wonderful are the newcuts and the short-circuits which the thought-paths make. Most thought-paths, it is true,are substitutes for nothing actual; they endoutside the real world altogether, in wayward fancies, Utopias, fictions or mistakes. Butwhere they do re-enter reality and terminatetherein, we substitute them always; and with

1 Of which all that need be said in this essay is that it also can beconceived as functional, and defined in terms of transitions, or of thepossibliity of such. [Cf. Principles of Psychology, vol. i, pp. 473-480,vol. ii, pp. 337-340; Pragmatism, p. 265; Some Problems of Philosophy, pp. 63-74; Meaning of Truth, pp. 246-247, etc. ED.]

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ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISMof shared reality, as around the Dyak s headof my late metaphor, floats the vast cloud ofexperiences that are wholly subjective, thatare non-substitutional, that find not even aneventual ending for themselves in the perceptual world the mere day-dreams andjoys and sufferings and wishes of the individual minds. These exist with one another, indeed, and with the objective nuclei, but outof them it is probable that to all eternity nointerrelated system of any kind will ever bemade.

This notion of the purely substitutional orconceptual physical world brings us to the mostcritical of all the steps in the development ofa philosophy of pure experience. The paradoxof self-transcendency in knowledge comes backupon us here, but I think that our notions ofpure experience and of substitution, and ourradically empirical view of conjunctive transitions, are DenJcmittel that will carry us safelythrough the pass.

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ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISMand on its way. To recur to the MemorialHall example lately used, it is only when ouridea of the Hall has actually terminated in thepercept that we know for certain that fromthe beginning it was truly cognitive of that.Until established by the end of the process, itsquality of knowing that, or indeed of knowinganything, could still be doubted; and yet theknowing really was there, as the result nowshows. We were virtual knowers of the Halllong before we were certified to have been itsactual know^ers, by the percept s retroactivevalidating power. Just so we are mortal allthe time, by reason of the virtuality of theinevitable event which will make us so whenit shall have come.Now the immensely greater part of all our

knowing never gets beyond this virtual stage.It never is completed or nailed down. I speaknot merely of our ideas of imperceptibles likeether-waves or dissociated ions, or of ejectslike the contents of our neighbors minds; I

speak also of ideas which we might verify if wewould take the trouble, but which we hold for68


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WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCEintegrates experience utterly, but its disjunctions are easily overcome again when the Absolute takes up the task.Such transcendentalists I must leave, pro

visionally at least, in full possession of theircreed. 1 I have no space for polemics in thisarticle, so I shall simply formulate the empiricist doctrine as my hypothesis, leaving it towork or not work as it may.

Objective reference, I say then, is an incident of the fact that so much of our experience comes as an insufficient and consists ofprocess and transition. Our fields of experiencehave no more definite boundaries than haveour fields of view. Both are fringed forever bya more that continuously develops, and thatcontinuously supersedes them as life proceeds.The relations, generally speaking, are as realhere as the terms are, and the only complaintof the transcendentalisms with which I couldat all sympathize would be his charge that, byfirst making knowledge to consist in externalrelations as I have done, and by then confess-

1 [Cf. below, pp. 93 ff.J71


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ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISMing that nine-tenths of the time these arenot actually but only virtually there, I haveknocked the solid bottom out of the wholebusiness, and palmed off a substitute of knowledge for the genuine thing. Only the admission, such a critic might say, that our ideas areself-transcendent and true already, in advance of the experiences that are to terminatethem, can bring solidity back to knowledgein a world like this, in which transitions andterminations are only by exception fulfilled.

This seems to me an excellent place forapplying the pragmatic method. When adispute arises, that method consists in auguring what practical consequences would bedifferent if one side rather than the other weretrue. If no difference can be thought of, thedispute is a quarrel over words. What thenwould the self-transcendency affirmed to existin advance of all experiential mediation ortermination, be known-as? What would itpractically result in for us, were it true ?

It could only result in our orientation, in theturning of our expectations and practical ten-

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WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCEdencies into the right path; and the right pathhere, so long as we and the object are not yetface to face (or can never get face to face, as inthe case of ejects), would be the path that ledus into the object s nearest neighborhood.Where direct acquaintance is lacking, knowledge about is the next best thing, and anacquaintance with what actually lies about theobject, and is most closely related to it, putssuch knowledge within our grasp. Ether-wavesand your anger, for example, are things inwhich my thoughts will never perceptually terminate, but my concepts of them lead me totheir very brink, to the chromatic fringes andto the hurtful words and deeds which are theirreally next effects.Even if our ideas did in themselves carry the

postulated self-transcendency, it would stillremain true that their putting us into possession of such effects would be the sole cash-value of the self-transcendency for us. And thiscash-value, it is needless to say, is verbatim etliteratim what our empiricist account pays in.On pragmatist principles therefore, a dispute

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ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISMover self-transcendency is a pure logomachy.Call our concepts of ejective things self-transcendent or the reverse, it makes no difference, so long as we don t differ about thenature of that exalted virtue s fruits fruitsfor us, of course, humanistic fruits. If anAbsolute were proved to exist for other reasons, it might well appear that his knowledge isterminated in innumerable cases where ours isstill incomplete. That, however, would be afact indifferent to our knowledge. The latterwould grow neither worse nor better, whetherwe acknowledged such an Absolute or left himout.So the notion of a knowledge still in transitu

and on its way joins hands here with thatnotion of a pure experience which I tried toexplain in my [essay] entitled Does Consciousness Exist? The instant field of thepresent is always experience in its pure state,plain unqualified actuality, a simple that, as yetundifferentiated into thing and thought, andonly virtually classifiable as objective fact or assome one s opinion about fact. This is as true

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WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCEwhen the field is conceptual as when it is perceptual. Memorial Hall is there in my ideaas much as when I stand before it. I proceed toact on its account in either case. Only in thelater experience that supersedes the presentone is this naif immediacy retrospectively splitinto two parts, a consciousness and its content, and the content corrected or confirmed.While still pure, or present, any experiencemine, for example, of what I write about inthese very lines passes for truth. Themorrow may reduce it to opinion. The trans-cendentalist in all his particular knowledges isas liable to this reduction as I am : his Absolutedoes not save him. Why, then, need he quarrelwith an account of knowing that merely leavesit liable to this inevitable condition? Why insist that knowing is a static relation out oftime when it practically seems so much a function of our active life? For a thing to be valid,says Lotze, is the same as to make itselfvalid. When the whole universe seems onlyto be making itself valid and to be still incomplete (else why its ceaseless changing?) why, of

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8/8/2019 William James - Essays in Radical E

William James - Essays in Radical Empiricism

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